Riding high on a Mexican wave,

As Tate Modern stages its major Frida Kahlo exhibition, Louise Baring reports on the resurgence of interest in art from Mexico
It was Madonna who helped transform Frida Kahlo into a collector's darling. Inspired by Frida - Hayden Herrera's bestselling 1983 biography of the Mexican painter - the singer hoped to play her in a film. Hollywood turned down the project. Mexican actress Salma Hayek took up the role in 2002, but Madonna meanwhile snapped up a couple of Kahlo paintings - including Self Portrait with Monkey, 1940 (now a key loan to the new Frida Kahlo show at Tate Modern), which she bought for more than $1 million from a Venezuelan collector who had paid just $44,000 for the picture at Sotheby's in New York in 1979. Just over a decade later, Self Portrait, 1929, sold for $5.4 million at Sotheby's in New York.

Moses or Nuclear Sun by Frida Kahlo

Kahlo's prices are "roaring upward", as one Manhattan collector puts it, in part because her work rarely comes on the market. The painter's output was small - roughly 200 works, around 50 of which cannot leave Mexico as they are regarded as national heritage. "Kahlo was also self-taught, so few of her early works are interesting," says New York-based Mexican art dealer Mary-Anne Martin. "Her late works are frequently choppy and crudely painted, as she was in tremendous pain and impaired by alcohol and painkillers."

Needless to say, forgeries are rife - though easily spotted. "At one point I was being offered one fake Frida a month," says Martin, who also has more fakes by Diego Rivera (Kahlo's husband, famous for his blend of folk art and propaganda) in her files than real ones.

The growing Latino presence in the US, combined with a slew in recent years of museum shows from ancient Mayan heads to modern video installations, has done much to revive interest in the rich artistic tradition of Mexico. As Fatima Bercht, chief curator of El Museo del Barrio in Manhattan, explains: "Mexico devotes far more resources than any other Latin American country to promoting its culture in the US."

While rich collectors such as film producer Joel Silver, former HBO boss Michael Fuchs, and Daniel Filipacchi, the chairman of Hachette, favour 20th-century Mexican masters, a younger generation of collectors - mostly Latin Americans, Americans and a sprinkling of Europeans - buy work by a new generation of Mexican artists breaking new ground: Santiago Sierra,with his sound installations;
Gabriel Orozco,(shown at the Serpentine Gallery in London last year), a popular photographer who also works in sculpture, drawing and video; Nahum B Zenil,known for his self-portraits examining his conflicting identities as a Catholic, an Indian and a homosexual; and Elena Climent,who records the lives of ordinary Mexicans in intimate still-lifes. An older photographer, 71-year-old Enrique Metinides, is recognised for his images of car crashes, bus accidents and train derailments composed like a scene from a crime or action movie.

"Unlike Frida Kahlo or Diego Rivera, these Mexican artists think of themselves as international. Many have strong links with the US or Europe," says Virgilio Garza, who runs Christie's Latin American department in New York. "Gabriel Orozco, for example, is represented by the Marian Goodman gallery in New York, rather than a gallery specialising in Latin American art."

As vintage photography enjoys a golden age, photography collectors and museums chase after vintage examples by 20th-century Mexican photographic masters such as Agustin Victor Casasola, (the subject of a current retrospective at the Museo del Barrio), who documented the upheaval of the Mexican revolution along with the jazz cafés and firing squads. Manuel Alvarez Bravo,who died three years ago aged 100, combined a profoundly Mexican subject-matter with avant-garde influences; while Italian-born Tina Modotti, who modelled for both Diego Rivera and Edward Weston, is famous for her still-lifes and photographs of Mexico's working class.

Tina Modotti's Telegraph Wires
Vintage prints of Modotti's best-known images, such as Telephone Wires or Calla Lilies, now fetch up to $350,000, says Spencer Throckmorton, a New York specialist in Mexican photography. "It's hard to believe that 25 years ago, the Latin American - let alone Mexican - art market didn't really exist," says Mary-Anne Martin, who set up Sotheby's first Latin American sale in 1979, where nervous bidders sat in clusters, country by country. Enlivened by a spattering of work by Mexican stars such as Diego Rivera and Rufino Tamayo or Wilfredo Lam, a Cuban painter, and Chilean Roberto Matta, most of the lots - 40 per cent of which were bought by visiting Mexicans - had never come up at auction before.

Of course, "international" artists such as Tamayo (who deliberately avoided being represented by a Mexican gallery) or David Alfaro Siqueiros, José Clemente Orozco, and Rivera - all of whom had painted murals in America during the 1930s - had a market. But most Mexican art languished for decades. Even Kahlo was dismissed as a local amateur, while English-language books on Mexican art could be found only in secondhand book stores.

Back in the 1930s and 1940s - a period of artistic interchange between the US and Mexico - Hollywood stars such as Edward G Robinson, Merle Oberon and Dolores del Rio snapped up Mexican art. In 1938, Edward G Robinson bought four Kahlos for $200 each - the 31-year-old painter's first major sale - while other enthusiasts included Edgar J Kaufmann, an industrialist, and Jacques Gelman, a European-born film producer who, with his wife Natasha, amassed a collection of 20th-century Mexican art.

Artistic taste changed, however, in the 1950s, when the Cold War led collectors to turn away from work that promoted socialist values. John D Rockefeller ordered workers to smash Diego Rivera's Man at the Crossroads - painted for the Rockefeller Centre in New York - when the artist refused to remove a portrait of Lenin. Kahlo's political hero, meanwhile, was Stalin. But, more importantly, the rise of post-war abstract expressionists such as Mark Rothko and Franz Kline (whose Crow Dancer fetched $6.4 million at Christie's post-war and contemporary art sale in New York last month) made the magic surrealism of Mexican art seem old-fashioned.

"I think that in the perverse way that market psychology operates, people began to respect the Mexican market once more when Frida Kahlo's prices started to climb," says Martin. The Tree of Hope, the first Kahlo to be sold at Sotheby's, in the late 1970s, did not even reach its lower estimate of $20,000. But the swell of public interest in Kahlo - a mythic creature of her own creation - combined with the introduction of Latin American sales in New York revived interest in Mexico's rich artistic tradition.

In 1990, Kahlo's Diego and I (1949), featuring a weeping Kahlo with Diego Rivera's image in her forehead, became the first Latin American painting to sell for more than $1 million. Charles Saatchi promptly asked a dealer to find him 10 or 12 self-portraits, but backed off when faced with a $3 million price tag for a self-portrait from 1940.

No Frida Kahlos were up for sale at last month's bi-annual Latin American auctions in New York, which also included 18th- and 19th-century colonial paintings. Sotheby's had a couple of important Riveras, once of which - La ofrenda (1928) - sold for $1.6 million. But while modern Mexican masters such as Maria Izquierdo, 64-year-old Francisco Toledo (the subject of a retrospective at the Whitechapel in 2000) and Gunther Gerzso can reach up to $500,000, only the colourful, textured paintings by Rufino Tamayo, who died in 1991, have sold for over $2 million,

Kahlo, meanwhile, remains by far the most expensive Mexican artist - indeed, the dearest in the whole of Latin America. Recognised even by those with scant interest in art, her work gives a collector instant status. And as Thomas Hoving, an ex-director of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, famously said: "Art is money-sexy-social-climbing fantastic."